We remark in advance, in general, that philosophy, through the universality of the concept of a determinacy or a power, arbitrarily sets its own boundary in relation to a determinate science; the determinate science is nothing other than the continuing presentation and analysis (taking the word in its higher sense) of how that which philosophy leaves undeveloped as a simple determinacy branches out again and is itself a totality. The possibility of such a development lies, formally, in the fact that the law of absolute form and of totality is immediately present in the Idea, according to which a determinacy is to be further cognized and developed; the real possibility, however, is present in that such a determinacy or power, not developed by philosophy, is not an abstraction or a truly simple atom, but, like everything in philosophy, is reality — and a reality is reality precisely because it is a totality and itself the system of the powers; to present the power as such is the development that belongs to the determinate science.

It follows from this that we might say, for the time being, that a good part of what is called the positive sciences of right — perhaps the whole of it — would fall within a philosophy fully developed and extended; and that, precisely because they constitute themselves as sciences in their own right, they are neither excluded from philosophy nor opposed to it; through the being-for-itself and the empirical differentiation of this body of sciences, no true distinction from philosophy is thereby established. That they call themselves empirical sciences — partly because they have their applicability in the actual world and wish to make their laws and manner of procedure valid before the common mode of representation as well, partly because they relate to the individual systems of existing constitutions and legislations, and belong to a determinate people as well as to a determinate time — this determines no difference that would necessarily exclude them from philosophy; for nothing needs to be so applicable to actuality, and so justified before the universal mode of representation — that is, the truly universal one, for there are common modes of representation that are, in this respect, quite particular — as that which comes from philosophy; just as, likewise, nothing can be so individual, living, and subsisting as that very same thing. In order to be able to speak of the relation of these sciences to philosophy, a difference must first be fixed and determined, by which they are positive sciences.

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